Washington and
its NATO allies are stepping up more military
involvement in this devastated North African
country, now experiencing an uptick in terrorist
activity, in some kind of macabre reprise of the
classic comedy routine.

Earlier
this week, Libya’s skirmishing factions announced
that they were forming a new “national unity
government”. The administration, backed by
the United Nations, was forged from two
erstwhile self-appointed rival governments based
in the western city of Tripoli and the eastern
city of Tobruk.

But the
chances of implementing national governance
remain wafer-slim. The real power in the country
resides with a plethora of warring militias that
have an overlapping relationship with the
Islamic State terror group and have carved up
the country into fiefdoms.

One
reason for why the “unity government”
was hastily and unconvincingly formed this week
is that it gives a fig leaf of legality for
greater Western military intervention in Libya
under the guise of helping “the authorities”
to fight jihadist terrorists.

Three
days after Libya’s new government was unveiled,
Washington’s top military officer, General
Joseph F Dunford, said that plans were under way
in the next weeks for “decisive action
needed against Islamic State in Libya,”
according to a Reuters
report.

“You want to take decisive
military action to check ISIL’s expansion and at
the same time you want to do it in such a way
that’s supportive of a long-term political
process,” said
General Dunford, using an alternative acronym
for the IS terror group.

The US
Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman was in Paris
where he was consulting with French, British and
Italian counterparts in the NATO military
alliance.

The New York Times reported
on Dunford’s announced military plans thus:
“Worried about a
growing threat from the Islamic State in Libya,
the United States and its allies are increasing
reconnaissance flights and intelligence
collecting there and preparing for possible
airstrikes and commando raids, senior American
policy makers, commanders and intelligence
officials said this week.”

For the
past several months, American, British and
French special forces have reportedly been
working clandestinely across Libya to try to
establish which militias their governments might
feasibly collaborate with.

But
Libya has been plunged into such tribal anarchy
over the past four years since the US-led NATO
powers toppled the government of Muammar Gaddafi
that it is nigh-impossible to disentangle the
plethora of rival militia. Many of the militia
and even some of the so-called political parties
in the new unity government are integrated with
the terror network.

A
farcical insight into the NATO-induced chaotic
nature of Libya is afforded by a
report on how a unit of 20 American special
forces were flown into an airport in the town of
Al Watiya near Tripoli last month. The US troops
were expecting a “warm reception” from
the militia thought to be in control of the
airport because it had received American
training and weapons back in 2012. It turned out
the US-trained Libyan battalion were no longer
the local top dog. They had been displaced by
another rival militia, which wasn’t friendly to
the Americans.

A
shoot-out was apparently avoided, but a tense
standoff ensued before the US commandos were
finally allowed safe passage from the airfield.

What
that snippet illustrates is the total shambles
that Libya has descended into. US troops feel
free to land in a country seemingly without any
legal sanction and then proceed to a
near-firefight with some unknown enemy holding
the airport facility. This is precisely the
state of ruins that Gaddafi predicted would
result from his demise, just before the
NATO-assisted insurgents took his life in a
barbaric street lynching in October 2011 and
proceeded to take over the once-prosperous,
stable country.

The
Americans and their NATO allies evidently
haven’t a clue which groups are running Libya –
and that’s months after their special forces
have allegedly been reconnoitering for
“partners” with which to purportedly fight
against the Islamic State.

America’s top general admitted to this
cluelessness in his announced plan for more
military intervention in Libya.

Dunford
said the “US military leadership owed
President Barack Obama and the US defense
secretary [Ashton Carter] ideas about the ‘way
ahead’ for dealing with the [IS] militant group”
in Libya.

In
other words, Dunford and his NATO counterparts
do not have a plan. They are simply going back
into a country that is riven with mercurial
militias, many of which are apparently aligned
with IS.

The American top general did not detail any
specific recommendations, saying: “I
think it’s pretty clear to all of us – French,
US alike – that whatever we do is going to be in
conjunction with the new [Libyan] government… My
perspective is we need to do more.”

As
noted earlier, working “in conjunction with
the new government” is not
confidence-inspiring given that it has only been
cobbled together this week after years of
feuding, and given that its various political
members are associated with illegally armed
groups.

Tragically, Libya is the very predictable
outcome when countries are self-entitled to run
amok in complete disregard of international law
and other nations’ sovereignty.

Washington, London and Paris, together with
other members of the NATO alliance, cynically
abused a UN no-fly mandate back in March 2011 to
launch a seven-month aerial blitzkrieg on Libya.
The NATO powers, along with the Saudi-led Arab
oil monarchies, colluded with jihadist groups on
the ground, such as the Libyan Islamic Fighting
Group, to achieve regime change in Libya.

These
same militia and their cache of weapons were
then mobilized
by the American CIA and British MI6 to
infiltrate Syria, according to American
journalist Seymour Hersh, among others. Turkey
was the conduit and Saudi Arabia was the
financier for the Libya-Syria “ratline”.
Note that this was around the same time that the
jihadist proxies had stormed the US consulate in
Libya’s Benghazi in September 2012, killing the
US ambassador Christopher Stevens and three
other American officials.

Now,
apparently, because of Russia’s searing military
intervention in Syria in support of the Assad
government forces, the jihadists are clearing
out of that country to set up bases in Libya.
This relocation of jihadists from Syria and Iraq
to Libya has even been reported in the Western
mainstream media.

So,
yes, Western governments and their military
chiefs may well articulate “concern”
about the surge in IS terror activity in Libya.
This surge is real enough.

But
what Washington, its NATO allies and the Western
media won’t tell you is that they incubated the
jihadist terror groups in Libya from their
illegal regime change against Gaddafi; and then
turned the country into a festering failed state
from where terror groups were spawned to carry
out a covert war for another regime change
operation in Syria.

And
after all that, we are told that these same
Western powers are going back into Libya to sort
out a mess – a mess that they created in the
first place. This is Laurel and Hardy of the
political and military kind. Only it's far from
funny. It’s a diabolically criminal sick joke.

Finian
Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on
international affairs, with articles published in
several languages. Originally from Belfast, Northern
Ireland, he is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural
Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the
Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England,
before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism.
For over 20 years he worked as an editor and writer
in major news media organizations, including The
Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance
journalist based in East Africa, his columns appear
on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and
Press TV.

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